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Timeline
5,459 dated events from 12 cities, in order. Each gives the passage that dates it and links to its full account. As more cities are published, their events join this timeline.
The first 189 dated events are on this page. Scroll to load the next decades, or open 1830s and later decades directly.
Before 1700 15 dated mentions
- 1679La Salle's passage: December 1679
The voyage: René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, came to this river in the late fall of 1679 by water, from the lake.
South Bend
- 1679La Salle at the portage, 1679 and 1681
The first European name in the record is a traveller passing through: In December 1679 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, came up the St. Joseph River from its mouth — where he had built a small fort at the lake — with a party in eight canoes, looking for the portage the Native peoples of the river had described to him.
South Bend
- 1679The Mission Era: Priests and Missionaries on the River, 1679–1857
In December 1679 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, came down the St. Joseph River and crossed the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage at the river's bend — the passage the tribes leg carries whole.
Mishawaka
- 1679The first passage, and the French century upriver
December 1679: The first European passage of this valley in the record is La Salle's, and it is dated to the month.
Granger
- 1679The first passage, and the French century upriver
The first European passage of this valley is dated to the month: in December 1679 La Salle's party — thirty-three persons in eight canoes, Tonty and Hennepin among them, with three Récollet friars…
Osceola
- 1679–1718The Town at the Portage: A Place the Record Cannot Fix
The documented facts: When the written record of this ground opens, in December 1679, La Salle's party came up the river of the Miamis to a town of the Miami people near the carrying place — the portage from the St. Joseph to the headwaters of the Kankakee.
South Bend
- 1679–1721The Parkovash: buffalo on the river, and the ox-head of Portage Prairie
The earliest dated animal record of the portage: When La Salle, lost on the portage in December 1679, finally came down the St. Joseph River to his party, the county history's account of the episode has him arriving "with the opossums hanging from his belt"…
South Bend
- 1679–1763The ground on imperial maps first: the river on French sheets, 1679–1763
The river enters print before the ground does: the St. Joseph River reached European paper with La Salle's expedition of December 1679 — the party raised Fort Miami at the river's mouth and on 3 December 1679 ascended the river to the south bend, crossing to the Kankakee portage above this ground.
Osceola
- 1679–1831The Mission Era: Priests on the St. Joseph River, 1679-1831
On 3 December 1679 Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, set out up the river then called the River of the Miamis, and his party found and crossed the St. Joseph-Kankakee portage, whose landing lay about two miles below the present limits of South Bend.
South Bend
- 1679–1837The mission era whole: from the river missions to the first resident congregation
The sequence, consolidated from this build's Before the City and Tribes legs and not retold at their depth, runs: La Salle's passage in December 1679; the French century administered from Fort St. Joseph (raised 1691, at present Niles) and its missions, and from the portage post where South Bend now stands…
Osceola
- 1679–1845The working river: what floated, what was locked, and what never reached Osceola
The river's first working use was the canoe and voyageur route tied to the St. Joseph–Kankakee portage, passable all year (Knoblock, 1925): La Salle ascended in 1679 with thirty men, and a brisk fur trade ran from about 1700.
Osceola
- 1679–1911The working river: keelboats, steamboats, the lock, and the races
The St. Joseph–Kankakee portage, passable at all times of year over solid high ground, tied the lake river to the Kankakee and so to the Illinois country; in 1679 La Salle, with thirty men including Hennepin and Tonty, passed up the river from Lake Michigan to the head of the portage…
Granger
- 1686The post that was not here: Fort St. Joseph at Niles, and the empty rapids
In 1686 King Louis XIV granted land to the Jesuits for the Mission de Saint-Joseph, where Father Claude Allouez ministered to the Potawatomi.
Mishawaka
- 1691Fort St. Joseph at Niles: the fort that governed the valley
The post: On the south side of present Niles, Michigan, where the lower St. Joseph River passes the crossing of the Sauk Trail and the Grand River Trail, near the portage that joins the Great Lakes watershed to the Mississippi's, the French in 1691 built Fort St. Joseph beside the Jesuit mission that already stood there…
Mishawaka
- 1691The fort beat: one fort for the valley, none for this ground, and the treaties that closed its era
The founding, without a dedication: The valley's fort was founded as an act of administration, not ceremony: the French sent soldiers to the Saint-Joseph mission in 1691 to expand the fur trade and solidify their Native relations, and Fort St. Joseph — mission, garrison and trading post together — stood from that year at present Niles.
Mishawaka
18th century 35 dated mentions
1720s
- 1720The machinery, honestly: the foreign-trade zone, corrected whole
But FTZ 125, whose grantee is the St. Joseph County Airport Authority at South Bend, holds an Alternative Site Framework service area that covers this county: the FTZ Board's reorganization order (Order No. 1720, Federal Register, 8 November 2010) names the zone's service area as St. Joseph, Elkhart, Kosciusko…
North Liberty
- 1721Ox-Head Prairie, named for a head of monstrous size
Charlevoix, camped on the portage on 17 September 1721, named Ox-Head Prairie for "the head of an ox of monstrous size" found there.
South Bend
- 1722–1794The two forts the spades cannot find
The French built Fort St. Philippe des Miamis in 1722, a palisaded post garrisoned by as many as thirty men; General Wayne's men built the first Fort Wayne in the autumn of 1794, the post that gave the city its name.
Fort Wayne
1730s
- 1738The opposition: what the churches and the critics said
The Church had condemned Freemasonry by name since Clement XII's bull In Eminenti of 1738; Leo XIII's encyclical Humanum Genus of 1884 renewed the condemnation for the fraternal age; and the Church's 1917 Code of Canon Law, canon 2335, attached excommunication to Catholic membership in Masonic and similar societies.
South Bend
1740s
- 1747–1763Burned, rebuilt, surrendered, destroyed
In 1747 Huron warriors allied with the English under Chief Nicholas caught the first fort undermanned — the commandant, Ensign Douville, and most of the garrison away at Detroit — and sacked and burned it.
Fort Wayne
1760s
- 1763The battles of the valley, each its own beat — and none of them here
The capture of Fort St. Joseph, 25 May 1763: In Pontiac's Rebellion the valley's one fort fell to the valley's own people: Potawatomi warriors took Fort St. Joseph at Niles and carried off its British garrison, Ensign Schlosser prisoner among them.
Mishawaka
- 1763–1794Before the fort · the actions at Kekionga, 1763–1794
The actions, in order: June 1763 — Pontiac's War. Ensign Robert Holmes, the British officer at the small post among the Miami towns, was ambushed and killed with his party, and the post passed into Native hands — the only British-era action on this ground.
Fort Wayne
- 1764–1816Pacanne · the chief who kept the town between empires
He emerges in 1764, in the aftermath of Pontiac's War, when his sparing of the captured British officer Thomas Morris — carried in the record as the act that made his name — set Kekionga's course of accommodation with the incoming British.
Fort Wayne
1770s
- 1774–1845Johnny Appleseed: the folk hero who died here, and lies here
The man behind the legend: John Chapman was born on 26 September 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, and Fort Wayne makes no claim on his birth or his upbringing.
Fort Wayne
- 1775–1869Soldiers before the townships: the Revolution's and 1812's men who came later
The Clay Township man the county list omits: Isaac Eaton, born in Loudoun County, Virginia, on 24 January 1775 — "having been born after his father's death," his grandson's biography in Howard says…
Granger
- 1779–1820The traders before the bend had a post: Burnett's valley
William Burnett, a New Jersey man of American sympathies, entered the St. Joseph valley sometime between 1779 and 1782 — the years vary across the accounts, and the scholarly study of his trade, Susan Sleeper-Smith's "St. Joseph Trade from Burnett to Taylor," carries the range…
South Bend
1780s
- 1781The traders before the post: the valley line, person by person
Antoine LeClare: Anson calls LeClare the first resident of the St. Joseph Valley: he settled a few miles upriver from Fort St. Joseph in 1781, soon after the fort's destruction — the line's first name, at the fort's own ground.
Mishawaka
- 1787–1850First families of record: the Black Laws, the county's first settlement, and the Powell freedom case
Indiana was technically a free state — the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the state constitution of 1816 both banned slavery — and practically a closed one.
Granger
- 1787–1850First families of record: the Black Laws, the county's first settlement, and the Powell freedom case
Indiana was technically a free state — the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the state constitution of 1816 both banned slavery — and practically a closed one.
Osceola
- 1789–1790Henry Hay's winter
The young trader Henry Hay wintered at Kekionga in 1789–90 and kept the diary that remains the best everyday description of the town before the armies came: the councils, the dances, the comings and goings of traders and war parties at the gate.
Fort Wayne
1790s
- 1790Harmar's Defeat
Harmar marched from Fort Washington (Cincinnati) on 7 October 1790 with 320 regulars of the First American Regiment and 1,133 militia — the largest army the young United States had yet fielded.
Fort Wayne
- 1790Harmar's Defeat
Gen. Josiah Harmar's expedition is mauled in detachments by Little Turtle's forces, the disaster that opens the American record here.
Fort Wayne
- 1790Harmar's Defeat · the first army sent against Kekionga
Kekionga, the Miami capital at the head of the Maumee, was the town the young United States had to break before it could hold the Old Northwest, and in the autumn of 1790 President Washington sent the first of three armies to do it.
Fort Wayne
- 1790The floods, as one river record
The city's Floods marker, standing at the confluence, reaches back to a significant flood in 1790 and states the system's first law: before dikes, the average flood level was about fourteen feet; as engineers diked the riverside neighborhoods, the same water, denied its floodplain, rose higher…
Fort Wayne
- 1791St. Clair's Defeat · not here
St. Clair's force wasted from about 2,000 men at its peak to some 920 officers and men present on the morning of 4 November 1791, camped unfortified on the upper Wabash.
Fort Wayne
- 1791St. Clair's Defeat · the road to Kekionga
Harmar's failure brought a bigger army with the same destination.
Fort Wayne
- 1791St. Clair's Defeat · the worst defeat
Marching north from Fort Washington in the autumn of 1791 with roughly 1,400 people — soldiers and a train of camp followers — St. Clair was under orders to build a post at Kekionga itself and hold it.
Fort Wayne
- 1793–1866The law it ran against · fugitive-slave machinery and Indiana's Black Laws
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and, far more harshly, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (18 September 1850) put rendition in the hands of federal commissioners: a claimant's sworn affidavit sufficed, the accused could not testify, there was no jury, and aiding a fugitive exposed the helper to a $1,000 fine, six months'…
Fort Wayne
- 1793–1866The law over their heads, whole: fugitive machinery, the Black Laws, Article XIII, and the register that does not survive for this county
The federal machinery came first, and the Norris charge states it: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 let a master or agent seize an absconding person and take him before a judge to prove the claim, and laid a $500 penalty, recoverable by the claimant, on anyone who obstructed the arrest, rescued the fugitive, or…
Granger
- 1794Fallen Timbers
His chief of scouts was the man who knew Kekionga best — William Wells , called Apekonit (“Wild Carrot”) for his red hair, a Kentucky captive adopted into the Miami, Little Turtle's son-in-law, who had fought against the United States at St. Clair's defeat before changing sides in 1794 and bringing Wayne the…
Fort Wayne
- 1794Fort Wayne is dedicated
On 22 October 1794 Col. Jean François Hamtramck dedicates and names Fort Wayne , fifteen cannon rounds for fifteen states, on the fourth anniversary of Harmar's Defeat.
Fort Wayne
- 1794Fallen Timbers, and a fort named Wayne
The Legion of the United States trained at Legionville and Pittsburgh, moved north behind a chain of new forts in 1793 — recovering, on the way, the very ground of St. Clair's defeat, where it built Fort Recovery — and advanced down the Maumee in the summer of 1794.
Fort Wayne
- 1794The forts as posts · three stockades, one garrison, 1794–1819
General Anthony Wayne's Legion reached Kekionga on 17 September 1794, and Wayne personally selected the site near the present intersection of Berry and Clay streets.
Fort Wayne
- 1794The first names · Black residents of the fort era
The presence precedes the town: Dodie Marie Miller's African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years , the community's own published history, begins its story in 1794, the year of the American fort, on evidence pointing to a Black inhabitant from the start.
Fort Wayne
- 1794Anthony Wayne: the namesake, who never lived here
What he did here: After the United States Army's two defeats at the hands of the Miami Confederacy, President Washington gave Wayne the Legion of the United States, and on 20 August 1794 Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near the Maumee Rapids in Ohio, the victory that broke the Confederacy's war.
Fort Wayne
- 1795Greenville from the council side
The Treaty of Greenville, signed 3 August 1795 after Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers, is usually told as an American instrument; from the council side it was the confederacy's reckoning with a war it could no longer feed.
Fort Wayne
- 1795Treaty of Greenville
Visit Fort Wayne's history page dates the treaty “August 10, 1795.” The treaty text says 3 August , a small, checkable error in a secondary source, and exactly the kind this record exists to catch.
Fort Wayne
- 1795Greenville, 1795: the six miles square at the confluence
Richardville, a young chief in 1795, signed for the Miami. The six miles square was not sold by metes and bounds again for a generation; it sat in the record as "the reserve at Fort Wayne," and the 1818 treaty boundary would be drawn around its lines.
Fort Wayne
- 1795The treaties that did not touch this ground
Proximity is not cession, and the instruments that passed this ground by are named so that none is ever inflated into a taking: The Treaty of Greenville (1795) ceded the Ohio country and a schedule of reserved tracts about the lakes and the Wabash posts; none of its ground lies in the St. Joseph valley.
Granger
- 1797–1814The portrait that burned: what Little Turtle looked like
On his visit to President Washington at Philadelphia in 1797, Little Turtle sat, at Washington's arrangement, to Gilbert Stuart, the painter of Washington's own portraits.
Fort Wayne
19th century 139 dated mentions
1800s
- 1800–1816The later forts
A replacement American fort rose in 1800, and after the War of 1812 Major John Whistler — grandfather of the painter — oversaw construction of the third and last in 1815–16: an all-wood post designed so that a garrison of only 50–75 men could hold it, remembered by its restorers as the most sophisticated wooden fort…
Fort Wayne
- 1801–1895The militia years: the county's standing companies, named from organization forward
The county's militia begins as Indiana's does: the Indiana National Guard's own history traces the institution to 1801, when the Indiana Territory organized militia companies to defend the settlements, and the forefathers of the 151st Infantry fought under General William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe in 1811.
Granger
- 1802John Koker: the Swiss emigrant of 1824, by way of Clay to Harris
The tie, exactly: settler — born in Switzerland in January 1802, a son of Benedict and Mary Koker; came to America in 1824 and lived in Ohio until 1846, then came to this county, living first in Clay Township and removing to Harris in 1847, where his eighty acres lay on Section 22.
Granger
- 1802–1828Annuity day: the agency's ledger
The spine of this era is a paper trail, and much of it survives: the Indian Agency's letter book for 1809–1815, transcribed by Gayle Thornbrough for the Indiana Historical Society in 1961, and Bert Griswold's Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802–1813 (1927), which prints the garrison orderly books and the agency's account book.
Fort Wayne
- 1803The first Treaty of Fort Wayne
It is the opening move of Harrison's treaty system — between 1803 and 1809 he would conclude eleven treaties transferring roughly 30 million acres — and Fort Wayne, seat of the agency and of Wells's interpretership, was one of its regular council grounds.
Fort Wayne
- 1803Fort Wayne, 1803: a treaty signed here, about land elsewhere
The transaction: The first treaty that bears this place's name was concluded at the fort on 7 June 1803, between Governor William Henry Harrison and the Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Eel River, Wea, Kickapoo, Piankashaw and Kaskaskia.
Fort Wayne
- 1803–1818The squeeze · the treaty line, 1803–1818
The Fort Wayne treaties of 1803 and 1809 — the second of them Governor Harrison's great purchase, signed at Fort Wayne and Vincennes, which took some three million acres of the Wabash and White River country…
Fort Wayne
- 1803–1839Elijah Lineback — the first family, in two tellings
Elijah Lineback, born 1803, of German origin, came with his wife Elizabeth (née Little) and child on horseback through the wilderness — she "was frequently thrown from her horse while on the journey, but never hurt the baby"…
Lakeville
- 1808George Hassig: Strasburg to Section 16 by way of Stark County
The tie, exactly: settler of the second wave — born at Strasburg, France, on 17 November 1808, a son of John and Barbara Hassig; came to America in 1832 and to Stark County, Ohio…
Granger
- 1809The second Treaty of Fort Wayne
Nearly 1,400 Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi and Eel River people attended the council at the fort in late September 1809.
Fort Wayne
- 1809The Treaty of Fort Wayne · three million acres, and the road to Tippecanoe
In late September 1809 nearly 1,400 Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi and Eel River people attended a council at the fort, where Governor William Henry Harrison of Indiana Territory pressed for a cession along the Wabash.
Fort Wayne
- 1809Fort Wayne, 1809: three million acres down the Wabash
The transaction: Harrison came back to Fort Wayne in September 1809 and took the largest cession yet from the Miami, Eel River, Delaware and Potawatomi.
Fort Wayne
- 1809–1840The cession cascade
Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809); St. Mary's (1818, creating the Big Miami Reserve); Mississinewas (1826, canal right-of-way); Forks of the Wabash (1838, 1840).
Fort Wayne
1810s
- 1810The vanished: bear, panther, bison, elk
James H. Madison's Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana concludes the bison "likely present in every part of Indiana" but concentrated across the southwest, along the Illinois prairie edge and the Buffalo Trace; Hornaday's Smithsonian extermination map, as the Cornell collection describes it, dates Indiana's bison to 1810.
Fort Wayne
- 1810–1872Norman Eddy: the physician who carried the town to Washington
The tie, exactly: Norman S. Eddy was not born in Mishawaka — he was born December 10, 1810, at Scipio, New York — and this section claims him at the strength the record gives: he was formed here as a professional.
Mishawaka
- 1810–1882John D. DeFrees: the printer who started the city's press — and Colfax
John Dougherty DeFrees (1810–1882): the man who brought printing to northern Indiana and, with it, the region's political class.
South Bend
- 1811–1876John A. Henricks: the founder whose biography never mentions the town
The man: Chapman's county biographical chapter (pp. 502–503) carries him whole, under the heading "JOHN A. HENRICKS": born in Pendleton County, Kentucky, 10 August 1811; farm to sixteen, then medicine at Urbana under Dr. Carter and a Cincinnati medical degree…
Osceola
- 1812Wells rides to Fort Dearborn
On 15 August 1812, a mile and a half from the fort, Potawatomi warriors ambushed the column.
Fort Wayne
- 1812The Siege of Fort Wayne
Some 500 Potawatomi and Miami besiege a garrison of about 100 until William Henry Harrison relieves it on 12 September.
Fort Wayne
- 1812The Siege of Fort Wayne · the post that held
General Hull surrendered Detroit on 16 August 1812; the Fort Dearborn garrison, evacuating under orders, was destroyed the day William Wells — the fort's own scout turned Indian agent's nephew by capture and adoption — was killed trying to shepherd it out.
Fort Wayne
- 1812The bridges, as crossings
Three rivers meant the town was always building bridges: The earliest picture of a Fort Wayne bridge is a woodcut: the state historic bridge survey, quoting Lossing's Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 , describes "the wooden timber trestle and kingpost bridge across the Maumee directly below the confluence,"…
Fort Wayne
- 1812The knife at the parley
The scene: The strangest scene of the 1812 siege of Fort Wayne happened indoors, under a flag of truce, with wine on the table.
Fort Wayne
- 1812The rivers' fish: sturgeon water to carp water, and partway back
Crail and Grabarkiewicz's Guide to the Common Fishes of the Toledo Area (2008) records that soldiers stationed at Fort Meigs during the War of 1812 "reported numbers of walleye and sturgeon so thick that thousands could be harvested in a day with a spear or simple fishing pole," and that gristmill dam owners on the…
Fort Wayne
- 1812Jacob Shimp: "the last Jackson voter in St. Joseph county" — carried at county strength
His birth year is printed both ways because Howard's own sketch gives both — 1812 at its head, 1811 in the family record it quotes.
Granger
- 1812–1907The Laidlaws: the Scot who walked to Indiana — two books, two journeys
John Laidlaw (Chapman, p. 822): born at "Blainsley," Scotland, 5 January 1812, son of John and Susan Laidlaw; the family went to St. Lawrence County, New York, in 1818; he came to this county in 1836 , worked his first winter for the St. Joseph Iron Company, arrived with $175 , married Sally Shaw in 1837…
Osceola
- 1812–1912The grave that was lost for a hundred years — and found scattered
Little Turtle died on July 14, 1812, and was buried in a family burial ground near Spy Run Creek. The grave was unmarked, and within a few generations the city had forgotten where it lay.
Fort Wayne
- 1814–1874Richard Carlisle, the founder — and Professor Risley
Richard Risley Carlisle was born in New Jersey in 1814 — Burlington County in the standard biography, Salem in the circus historians' anthology.
New Carlisle
- 1816The frame: meridian, state line, and the survey of the township
The act of Congress of 19 April 1816 that enabled Indiana's statehood set the state's northern boundary as an east-and-west line through a point ten miles north of the southern extreme of Lake Michigan, and by an act of 2 March 1827 Congress authorized the President to have that line ascertained and marked.
Mishawaka
- 1816The grid on this ground: meridian, state line, and the fractional tier
The state's northern boundary — the line ten miles north of Lake Michigan's southern extreme set by the enabling act of 19 April 1816, and run on the ground by Eleazer P. Kendrick in October 1827 from William Harris's corner of June 1817, a wooden post at every mile to the 105th mile…
Granger
- 1816–1841Richardville's system · the reserve strategy
Pinšiwa — Jean Baptiste de Richardville, born about 1761 at Kekionga, son of the French trader Antoine-Joseph Drouet de Richerville and Tacumwah, Pacanne's sister…
Fort Wayne
- 1816–1850The reserved sections inside the plat: school, swamp, and the county purchase
The school section came first in law: Indiana's Enabling Act of 1816 granted section 16 of every township to the inhabitants of that township for the use of schools, so Section 16 of Township 36 North, Range 2 East — a mile-square two sections north of the townsite's southern row…
Lakeville
- 1816–1851The 1831 Bond Law — the Frame Samuel Huggart Bought Under
Indiana prohibited slavery in 1816; it did not confer civil equality.
Lakeville
- 1816–1881The law over their heads · the Black Laws, Article XIII, and the register that does not survive
The framework the community lived under: Indiana's first constitution, in 1816, banned slavery outright, and the ban was never the whole of the law.
South Bend
- 1816–1881The law over their heads: Black Laws, Article XIII, and the 1851 exclusion vote — frame whole, county count a named gap
The Black Laws, in the order they closed in: Indiana's first constitution (1816) barred Black men from voting and from the militia, and the statute book of the free state then built the rest of the cage: no testimony by a Black witness against a white party, no public schools.
Granger
- 1816–1881Andrew Huggart: the brother who farmed it
Andrew Huggart was born in Virginia in 1816, learned the shoemaker's trade, moved at twenty to Dayton and afterwards to Miami County, Ohio, and in 1839 married Jane Clark, a native of Amherst County, Virginia.
Lakeville
- 1816–1907The Moons: four households, one surname, no mergers
(b) Nelson Moon (Chapman, p. 831): born in Yates County, New York, 1 January 1816, son of Reynolds Moon, the War of 1812 soldier of the Wars file, and Nancy (Briggs) Moon; he came to the county in 1839, settled in Penn Township section 6, owned 175 acres, worked railroad wood contracts, and was a Mason for over thirty years.
Osceola
- 1817Joseph L. Krupp: blacksmith first, then 440 acres — and Susan Krupp, a patron in her own name
The tie, exactly: settler and tradesman — born in Germany on 1 January 1817, a son of Charles and Catharine Krupp, whose family came to Seneca County, Ohio, in 1833…
Granger
- 1818Francis Comparet's trading house
Founded: Francis Comparet came up the Maumee to Fort Wayne in 1818 as a fur trader and built one of the town's first permanent trading establishments: a brick residence with an adjoining store and trading house on Columbia Street, standing by 1830, and later a warehouse on the canal basin.
Fort Wayne
- 1818Francis Comparet — the first store on Columbia Street
Fort Wayne's business record opens with a fur trader: Francis Comparet came up the Maumee to Fort Wayne in 1818 and built one of the town's first permanent trading establishments…
Fort Wayne
- 1818Commitment: the law's local course
An act of 1818 empowered the circuit courts to conduct inquests into cases of suspected insanity and to appoint guardians for persons adjudged insane; later acts gave the courts the power to commit such persons to the state hospitals.
South Bend
- 1818Commitment: the law's local course
An act of 1818 empowered the circuit courts to conduct inquests into cases of suspected insanity and to appoint guardians for persons adjudged insane; later acts gave the courts power to commit such persons to the state hospitals.
Mishawaka
- 1818The grave that is not there
Mishawaka's most famous grave belongs to a woman who never lived: The monument the citizens of Mishawaka erected in 1932 — a statue on a native boulder provided by the Daughters of the American Revolution, its tablet given by the Lions Club, standing today on the riverwalk at Lincoln Park…
Mishawaka
- 1818–1840The Richardville grants: 28,320 acres, treaty by treaty
The 1818 grants: Article 3 of St. Mary's granted Jean Baptiste Richardville, by patent in fee simple, a schedule of tracts that the Park Service's nomination totals at eleven sections — 7,040 acres.
Fort Wayne
- 1818–1850The other reserves on and around this ground
The 1834 treaty, commuting older grants, recites four sections on the Salamonie granted him at St. Mary's in 1818; the 1826 schedule gave him a section on the north side of the Wabash above Richardville's spring tract, with his brother Louison's section above that and Francis Lafontaine's above Louison's…
Fort Wayne
- 1818–todayCommitment as law: who could commit, to where, and how it changed
An Act of 1818 empowered Indiana circuit courts to conduct inquests into suspected insanity and to appoint guardians for persons adjudged insane; later acts gave the courts the power to commit such persons to state hospitals.
Osceola
- 1819–1840Garrison out, town in
The Army withdraws in 1819; a federal land office follows. The town is platted in 1823 , Allen County is organized in 1824 , Fort Wayne incorporates as a town in 1829 (population ~300) and as a city on 22 February 1840 (population over 2,000).
Fort Wayne
- 1819–1896Luigi Gregori: the Vatican painter who founded the department
Luigi Gregori (1819–1896): the first artist of the record, and the founder of art teaching on this ground.
Notre Dame
1820s
- 1820The fur traders: Navarre, Coquillard, Taylor
The town grew out of the fur trade, and kept its shape: The first permanent settler at the bend was Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, an educated Frenchman who arrived in 1820 as an agent of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company and built his cabin and trading post on the river near what is now downtown…
South Bend
- 1820The French of the trading town
The town's first settler community was French: Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, who established his post at the bend in 1820, and Alexis Coquillard, who built the trading house, the mill race ambitions and the town plat itself, headed a French and French-Canadian trading community…
South Bend
- 1820–1822The first school — Isaac McCoy at the fort
Founded: May 29, 1820, by the Rev. Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, who opened a school inside the decommissioned Fort Wayne at the urging of the Miami chief Jean Baptiste de Richardville.
Fort Wayne
- 1820–1865The traders: the men the town grew on
An educated French-Canadian in the service of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, Navarre came up the St. Joseph River in 1820 and established the first trading post at the south bend of the river, on land that was still, in law and in fact, Potawatomi land — the county record's "1820…
South Bend
- 1820–1966The Brothers on This Ground Before the College
The teaching brotherhood behind it began in France in 1820, when the parish priest Jacques-François Dujarié gathered young men at Ruillé-sur-Loir to teach in parish schools that had no teachers; they were called the Brothers of Saint Joseph.
Notre Dame
- 1820–1975The township's own law: the justice of the peace and the constable
Indiana's justices date to 1820 — constitutional officers, elected by each township, laymen as often as lawyers — and their courts were built for exactly the ground this section covers: countywide jurisdiction over petty crimes, small civil claims, and marriages, close enough to reach on foot and cheap enough to use without counsel.
Granger
- 1820–1990The postmasters — the federal government's local face
The Political Graveyard's roster of the office opens with Benjamin B. Kercheval in 1820, followed by Samuel Hanna, 1820–25.
Fort Wayne
- 1820–todayThe Pioneer Stock — the Navarre Cabin and What Survives of the First City
Pierre Freischutz Navarre, an agent of John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company who came from Monroe, Michigan, built his cabin and trading post in 1820 on the north bank of the St. Joseph River, at what is now 123 West North Shore Drive, sited for the river, the Kankakee and the portage between them.
South Bend
- 1821The county asylum: the poorhouse and its insane charges
The act of 1821 that provided for houses for the employment of the poor opened the county asylums to the insane as well — the county's own historical timeline of its county home states it in so many words — and in St. Joseph County the commissioners began, in 1831, by renting houses in South Bend for the destitute.
South Bend
- 1821The cessions, instrument by instrument; the chiefs' deaths; and the removal
The Treaty of Chicago, 29 August 1821, ceded some five million acres of Michigan country and left Indiana's St. Joseph valley in Potawatomi title.
Mishawaka
- 1821The county asylum: Mishawaka's share
Care of the mind began as poor relief, and the relief was the county's: Indiana's act of 1821 that provided for houses for the employment of the poor opened the county asylums to the insane as well, and St. Joseph County's asylum stood, in every one of its forms, on the far side of the river: the rented houses in…
Mishawaka
- 18211821: the Treaty of Chicago does not reach this ground
The town lies west of the 1821 cession's western boundary, though north of its southern one.
New Carlisle
- 1821The other instruments, each tested
The Treaty of Chicago, 29 August 1821 (7 Stat. 218, Royce Area 117), ceded the country between the 1817 line and the meridian of Parc aux Vaches on the St. Joseph — the townsite stands south of the 1817 line and west of that meridian, outside the tract on both of its limbs.
North Liberty
- 1821The calls check — the one joint the text leaves open
The western limb is the joint: the 1821 polygon's western side in this longitude band is its first call, a segment "running thence south" from "a point on the south bank of the river St. Joseph of Lake Michigan, near the Parc aux Vaches, due north from Rum's Village" — and the treaty gives that point no longitude, bearing or monument.
Indian Village
- 1821The reserve test on this ground
The 1821 treaty's own Article 2 reserves five village tracts from the cession — at Mang-ach-qua Village, at Mick-ke-saw-be, at the village of Na-to-wa-se-pe, at the village of Prairie Ronde, and at Match-e-be-nash-she-wish at the head of the Kalamazoo River — and the text locates every one by a Michigan place-name…
Indian Village
- 1821The calls check — the one joint the text leaves open
The western limb is the joint: the 1821 polygon's western side in this longitude band is its first call, a segment "running thence south" from "a point on the south bank of the river St. Joseph of Lake Michigan, near the Parc aux Vaches, due north from Rum's Village" — and the treaty gives that point no longitude, bearing or monument.
Roseland
- 1821The reserve test on this ground
The 1821 treaty's own Article 2 reserves five village tracts from the cession — Mang-ach-qua, Mick-ke-saw-be, Na-to-wa-se-pe, Prairie Ronde, and Match-e-be-nash-she-wish at the head of the Kalamazoo — and all five are Michigan tracts ; none touches Indiana.
Roseland
- 1821–1828The treaties that did not touch this ground
Chicago, 29 August 1821: The Treaty of Chicago took from the Ottawa, Chippewa and Potawatomi a great tract in present Michigan, its southern line running to the Indiana boundary country west of this county.
Fort Wayne
- 1821–1833The nations, tested one by one against this ground
The Chippewa and Ottawa: parties with the Potawatomi to the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, whose cession ran between the 1817 line and the Parc aux Vaches meridian — north and east of here — and took nothing on this ground.
North Liberty
- 1821–1836The nation-by-nation test completed: Ottawa, Chippewa, and the Potawatomi chiefs of this valley
The Ottawa test: the Ottawa appear on this county's paper in the Treaty of Chicago of 1821, a joint instrument with the Chippewa and Potawatomi, and in Howard's quoted valley summary — the Potawatomi "with their cousins, the Ottawas and the Chippewas, once possessed and occupied this vast territory."
Lakeville
- 1821–2026Commitment as law: who could commit, to where, and how it changed
The law's first answer was the poorhouse itself: the 1821 act that created county poor asylums opened them to the insane, and the county superintendent was charged in 1848 to be a person of medical knowledge who would "care for the sick, infirm and insane."
Granger
- 1821–2026Tested nation by nation
Chippewa / Ottawa (Ojibwe / Odawa): NEGATIVE for this ground — parties with the Potawatomi to the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, whose cession missed this ground on both limbs; no cession, reserve, village, or use statement for Liberty Township in any reached carrier.
North Liberty
- 1822The trading houses
Alexander Ewing , an Irish immigrant who had first seen Fort Wayne in 1812, in the column that broke the siege, settled his family here in 1822, kept the Washington House tavern at Barr and Columbia, and bought heavily at the first land sales…
Fort Wayne
- 1822Isaac McCoy's mission church, and the First Baptist line
The Allen County Genealogical Society's Wayne Township church survey, drawing on the congregation's own record, states that the first assembly of any faith in the Fort Wayne area was organized by the Rev. Isaac McCoy, the Baptist missionary to the Indians: the church was formally organized with eleven charter members…
Fort Wayne
- 1822The French century upriver: Fort St. Joseph and the missions
Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, founded Carey Mission in 1822 on the river near the old fort — a school and mission to the valley's Potawatomi, Michigan ground again, printed here because the treaty that ceded the Indiana valley was negotiated at "the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph" six years later.
South Bend
- 1822Rum Village: the name that outlived the village
Rum Village is the oldest named neighborhood ground in the city, and the only one whose name is a chief's: the Potawatomi village of Chief Torum — "Rum," in the rendering the record carries — stood on the ground southwest of the present downtown, north of West Ewing Avenue and west of South Main Street…
South Bend
- 1822–1835The mission ground: Carey Mission, the Sauk Trail corridor, and a township named Olive
The Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy established the Carey Mission among the Potawatomi on the St. Joseph River near present Niles, Michigan, in December 1822; its school opened 27 January 1823 with thirty pupils, and the mission — named for the English Baptist missionary William Carey…
New Carlisle
- 1822–todayRum Village: The Drink That Never Named It
The paper trail runs early: the missionary Isaac McCoy conversed with the village's people in the spring of 1822; the Keating expedition of 1824 saw Torum's village and its cornfields…
South Bend
- 1823The land office and the first sales
Because the district was not yet surveyed, the offices stood vacant until 1823, when President Monroe appointed Samuel C. Vance register and Joseph Holman receiver.
Fort Wayne
- 1823Suttenfield's Tavern (William Suttenfield / Suttonfield)
Founded: 1823 per the Barr-and-Columbia marker inscription ("North East — Suttenfield Tavern 1823") — The firm record underneath it: the first tavern licence in organised Allen County was granted to William Suttonfield on 10 August 1824 (fee $12.50, circuit court having acted on the application)…
Fort Wayne
- 1823Wayne Lodge No. 25: the first secret society in Fort Wayne
A lodge older than the county: On March 22, 1823, John Sheets, Grand Master of Masons in Indiana, granted a dispensation to Alexander Ewing, John P. Hedges and Benjamin Cushman, and others, to form a lodge at Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1823–1831Alexis Coquillard: the last of the traders
The accounts divide on the season of his settling, and the file prints the division: The Story of South Bend (1920) has him come to the post in 1823, aged twenty-eight, and buy out the business Navarre had established the following year…
South Bend
- 1823–1834The first storekeepers — Suttenfield, Ewing, Henderson, Bourie, Holcomb & Marquis, Coles
The town's first businesses were kept by men the record mostly knows by a licence or a single account: William Suttenfield held one of the first tavern licences — the Barr-and-Columbia marker dates the Suttenfield Tavern 1823.
Fort Wayne
- 1823–1880T. J. Garoutte: merchant, trustee, legislator
T. J. Garoutte was born in Ohio 19 December 1823, son of James S. and Mary (Babington) Garoutte; the family came to Indiana in 1830 and to this county in 1831, the year of his mother's death on the Rolling Prairie road, told above.
New Carlisle
- 1823–1885Schuyler Colfax: the city's vice president
Schuyler Colfax (1823–1885): South Bend's highest-reaching son, and the fullest political life this section holds.
South Bend
- 1823–1885Schuyler Colfax — Speaker of the House, Vice President of the United States
He was born in New York City on March 23, 1823. His family moved west to New Carlisle, Indiana, in 1836, when he was thirteen, and in 1841 he moved to South Bend, where his stepfather, George W. Matthews, had become auditor of St. Joseph County and took the young man on as his deputy — a post Colfax held for some eight years.
South Bend
- 1823–1987The Olivers: the plow, the presidency, and Copshaholm
James Oliver (1823–1908): the inventor. Born on 28 August 1823 at Newcastleton, Scotland, Oliver came to America in 1835, and in May 1855 bought a quarter interest in a South Bend foundry.
South Bend
- 1824Allen County: the act, the tavern, the first officers
The act for the formation of Allen County, approved December 17, 1823, named five commissioners "to determine and locate the seat of justice" — Lot Bloomfield and Caleb Lewis of Wayne County, Abiathar Hathaway of Fayette County, William Conner of Hamilton County, and James M. Ray of Marion County…
Fort Wayne
- 1824The first taverns and the saloon era, in brief
Licensed from the start: The first tavern licenses in Allen County were granted on August 10, 1824, to William Suttenfield and Alexander Ewing, each paying $12.50 for the privilege, their houses standing on opposite corners of Barr and Columbia streets — Ewing's house was called Washington Hall.
Fort Wayne
- 1824The first beds in town: the tavern licenses of 1824
Lodging is the town's first licensed business: On August 10, 1824 — months after the townsite was platted — the first tavern licenses in Fort Wayne were granted, to William Suttonfield and to Alexander Ewing, each on payment of $12.50, the Circuit Court having acted on the applications first.
Fort Wayne
- 1824Bounties, taxes, and the wolf
The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, describes the first tax years after the county's organization in 1824 — fifty cents on every male over twenty-one, thirty-seven and a half cents on a horse — and then states: "The State taxes were generally paid in wolf scalps, on which a bounty was allowed."
Fort Wayne
- 1824Michael Smith: the German child of 1826 who ended with 380 acres and a Granger post office
The tie, exactly: settler — born in Germany on 24 August 1824, a son of Frederick and Elizabeth Smith, whose family crossed in 1826 and wandered the era's immigrant road — New York, Buffalo, Canada, Stark County, Ohio — before Michael came to this county in 1842 and built a 380-acre stock farm on Section 17.
Granger
- 1824–1840Chosen in a tavern — the first officers
Allen Hamilton, an Irish immigrant trader, was commissioned sheriff on 2 April 1824 by Governor William Hendricks, to serve until the people could elect one; he conducted the county's first election on 22 May 1824 and was paid twenty dollars for his first six months.
Fort Wayne
- 1824–1883The first jails and the scaffold · 1824–1883
Allen County was organized in 1824, and its first court business was the ordinary business of a frontier county: debts, assaults, stray livestock, and theft.
Fort Wayne
- 1824–1887Mother Angela Gillespie, the Virtual Foundress
She was born Eliza Maria Gillespie in 1824 at Brownsville, Pennsylvania. On 17 April 1853, at Bertrand, she received the habit from Father Sorin as Sister Mary of St. Angela.
Notre Dame
- 1824–1908Paid in wolf scalps
The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, sets out the first tax schedule after the county's organization in 1824 — fifty cents on every male over twenty-one, thirty-seven and a half cents on a horse…
Fort Wayne
- 1825The County Seminary and the first schoolhouse
Founded: 1825, when Allen County built its first schoolhouse — a brick building, standing behind the site of the later county jail, and remembered in the Griswold-Phelps Handbook of 1913–14 as the first brick schoolhouse in Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1825Christian Schneck: out of Germany in 1853, six years in Berrien County, then Section 9
The tie, exactly: settler of the late wave — born in Germany on 10 July 1825, a son of Adam and Margaret Schneck; left Germany in 1853; spent six years from 1854 in Berrien County, Michigan, and then came to this township, where his farm was ninety-three acres on Section 9.
Granger
- 1826The road, the river road that never came, and the railroad: the transport beats
The Michigan Road — Madison on the Ohio to Michigan City on the lake, through Indianapolis — was granted by the Potawatomi treaty of 16 October 1826, surveyed in rival routes, and fixed on 13 January 1830 by the route through South Bend, four miles below this ground: the great thoroughfare of northern Indiana ran past…
Mishawaka
- 1826The state as landowner: the road grant, the school section, the swamp lands
By the second article of the 1826 treaty the Potawatomi granted a strip one hundred feet wide for a road from Lake Michigan to the Wabash, "and also a quantity of good land, contiguous to the said road, equal to one section for each mile of the said road," with the like quantity for the road's continuation toward the…
Granger
- 1826Starting title: the Potawatomi Tribe as landowner
Every instrument plotted below is therefore tested as a cession by that entity, and the Commission's own area-by-area attributions are carried beside the plot test: as the articles show, the Commission's mapping agrees with the treaty calls — the strip above the 1817 line at this longitude is an 1826 taking.
New Carlisle
- 18261826: the treaty that took the townsite
The townsite was taken by the second tract of the first article of the Treaty of 16 October 1826. The treaty, made near the mouth of the Mississinewa, cedes two tracts.
New Carlisle
- 1826Reserves, tested at tract level
The 1826 scholar quarter-sections lay on the St. Joseph by Carey Mission, as the article above states. The nearest named reserve in the county's wider record, the reserve of Menominee's band at the Twin Lakes, stands southeast of here in present Marshall County and does not reach Liberty Township.
North Liberty
- 1826–1830The Michigan Road: the treaty strip and the survey
The road was bought with land before it was built with money: The Michigan Road — the state road from Madison on the Ohio River to Michigan City on Lake Michigan, by way of Indianapolis and South Bend…
South Bend
- 1826–1832The treaty strip and the survey: a hundred feet wide, a section a mile
By Article 3 of the treaty of 16 October 1826 — the same instrument family whose cessions the land build plots — the Potawatomi ceded, in the text as the Marshall County history prints it verbatim: "a strip of land commencing at Lake Michigan and running thence to the Wabash river, 100 feet wide, for a road, and also…
Lakeville
- 1826–1833The taking, instrument by instrument: 1826, 1828, 1832, 1833
1826 — what Mississinewa did and did not take: The treaty line for this ground opens at the mouth of the Mississinewa on 16 October 1826 (7 Stat.
South Bend
- 1826–1833The founding road whole — and the Michigan Road, tested and failed on this ground
The Michigan Road test, run first and printed whole: the Michigan Road was conceived in the 1826 Treaty of Mississinewa, by which the Potawatomi and Miami ceded the strip for a road from the Ohio River to Lake Michigan…
Osceola
- 1826–1834The founding road: the treaty strip and the survey
Article Two of the treaty with the Potawatomi of 16 October 1826 — the same instrument whose schedule of grants put the townsite's quarter-section in Lazarus Bourissa's hands, dug whole in this build's land section…
New Carlisle
- 1826–1835Lazarus Bourissa and the treaty-grant families
The schedule attached to the Treaty of 1826 (7 Stat.
New Carlisle
- 1826–1835The founders, on both sides of the ground
On the Indigenous side the founding is a treaty paper: the schedule attached to the Treaty of 16 October 1826 (7 Stat.
New Carlisle
- 1826–1835The treaty-era fortune: the grants totalled, the cash stated at its record
The Treaty of 16 October 1826 (7 Stat.
New Carlisle
- 1826–1835The reserves on this ground: the Carey Mission scholar quarter-sections
The sixth article of the Treaty of 1826 and the schedule of grants annexed to it (the schedule text at 7 Stat.
New Carlisle
- 1826–1838Reserves and the band that stayed
The tract-level reserve tests are printed whole in the land section: the 1828 treaty's anchor reservations stand in the Elkhart and Wabash country; its individual grants could by its own terms be located only inside the 1828 tract, east of the meridian this ground lies west of…
North Liberty
- 1826–1848The reserves around, none on, this ground
The 1826 scholar quarter-sections at Carey Mission lay on the St. Joseph at Niles, Michigan, about 22 miles north-northeast — across the state line and a full township-tier set north; no scholar grant is placed in or near Liberty Township in any carrier reached.
North Liberty
- 1826–1966The Studebakers: five brothers, a dead president, and the two who saved it
Henry Studebaker (1826–1895) and Clement Studebaker (1831–1901) opened the blacksmith shop at Michigan and Jefferson streets on 16 February 1852 on 68 dollars of capital.
South Bend
- 1826–2026The era structure: five parts, every fortune assigned
Trading and land (1826–1880): the treaty grants (the article above) and the prairie holders — Reynolds, Clark and Ranstead, 7,433 acres together — sized in the sector article below.
New Carlisle
- 1827The canal grant, 1827: the state becomes a landowner
The act of 2 March 1827 made the state a proprietor.
Fort Wayne
- 1827The Chief Richardville House — the History Center's satellite
The house as museum: The house Jean Baptiste de Richardville built in 1827 at 5705 Bluffton Road — subsidized by the United States under the 1826 Treaty of Mississinewa, and described by the History Center as the oldest Native American building in the Midwest and the only surviving treaty house in the nation…
Fort Wayne
- 1827The survey: a fence run before the cession
An act of 2 March 1827 authorized the marking of the line, and Surveyor General Edward Tiffin contracted deputy Eleazer P. Kendrick, whose field notes open on 8 October 1827 at the lake's southern extremity: from the 1817 corner he ran east, setting a wooden post at every mile, to the 105th mile.
Granger
- 1827–1854W.G. & G.W. Ewing Company (the House of Ewing)
Founded: The Indiana State Library's finding aid for the George W. Ewing letters states plainly that G.W. Ewing "founded the firm W.G. and G.W. Ewing with his brother William in 1827."
Fort Wayne
- 1827–1888Barnett & Hanna Mill — the first gristmill (later Fairfield Mill, Beaver Mill, Glenwood Mill, Esmond Mill)
Founded: Completed August 1827. Roy M. Bates's specialist study The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (Feb 1942, Allen County Public Library) states plainly: "The first water-powered mill erected in Allen County was completed in August, 1827, by James Barnett and Samuel Hanna."
Fort Wayne
- 1827–1907Plumb the merchant and Smith the station agent: the village's two working men of record
Henry S. Plumb (Chapman, p. 834) is the earliest Osceola merchant the assigned sources name by name and date: born in Delaware County, Ohio, 23 August 1827, son of George and Abbie Plumb; three years in Iowa and three in Illinois; then the war…
Osceola
- 1828Holcomb & Marquis Tannery (later the Robinson / Grand / Randall Hotel building)
Founded: Two independent News-Sentinel accounts agree: the city history ("Absalom Holcomb and Isaac Marquis opened a tannery a year later [than the 1827 gristmill] at the west end of Columbia Street") and Michael Hawfield's Cityscapes history of the Randall Hotel ("The Randall Hotel began in 1828 as a tannery.
Fort Wayne
- 1828The 1828 trades — Madore Truckery's cooper shop & Holloway Cushman's blacksmith shop (combined thin-record entry)
Founded: 1828 for both — single-source, thin. The only mention found for either business, after targeted searching, is one sentence-pair in the News-Sentinel city history: "Madore Truckery opened his cooper shop that year [1828, the year after the gristmill passage].
Fort Wayne
- 1828The Methodists: mission of 1828, Berry Street Chapel, and First Wayne Street
The Indiana United Methodist Conference's heritage record and the congregation's historical marker agree: Methodism in the Fort Wayne area was organized as a mission in 1828.
Fort Wayne
- 1828The Randall Hotel: a tannery that became "the best $2 hotel in Indiana"
From hides to guests: The Randall's building began in 1828 as a tannery at the foot of Columbia Street — built, in Michael Hawfield's account, by Absalom Halcomb and Isaac Marquis, its basement vats soaking hides in urine and oak bark; the genealogical society's timeline names the 1828 tannery on the site as Jacob Fry's.
Fort Wayne
- 1828The cession as a transaction, and the reserve test
The townsite's Indian title was extinguished by one instrument, and the instrument's own terms are the record: The treaty concluded 20 September 1828 "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey Mission, by present Niles…
Mishawaka
- 1828The taking, instrument by instrument: the cession of 1828
This ground's Indian title was extinguished by one instrument, and the instrument's own terms are the record: The treaty concluded 20 September 1828 "at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph, of Lake Michigan" — Carey Mission, by present Niles…
Granger
- 18281828: the Carey Mission treaty takes ground on both sides of this strip — not this strip
The town lies in the gap between the 1828 treaty's two cessions.
New Carlisle
- 1828The taking: the Treaty of St. Joseph, 20 September 1828 — the second cession
The townsite was ceded by the second cession of the Potawatomi treaty concluded at the Missionary Establishments upon the St. Joseph on 20 September 1828.
Lakeville
- 1828The 1828 treaty, tested: it did not take this ground
The Treaty of St. Joseph of 1828 — the taking instrument for ground north and east of here — stops at a meridian east of the townsite.
North Liberty
- 1828–1860First crops and the orchard seeds: the prairie broken, and Edmund Byrkit's apples
The first farming of Penn Township was subsistence at the edge of someone else's market: the Moats on section 17 from 1828, the roll of first settlers the People leg carries whole — Holt, Skinner, Cottrell, Curtis, the Byrkits, the Irelands…
Osceola
- 1828–2026The frame: two bands, one township, and a town that moved
The frame: Band 1 of this section runs from the first settlers of 1828 to the generation Howard interviewed in 1907; its stage is the town of Osceola and Penn Township's farm country outside the city of Mishawaka, which shares the township and takes its own people in its own build.
Osceola
- 1828–todayFloods · the recorder's roster
The city Flood Control Department keeps a Chronological List of Floods running back to January 1828 . FEMA names the four greatest Fort Wayne floods of the modern record: 1913, 1978, 1982 and 1985 .
Fort Wayne
- 1829The flight of the fugitive slaves · October 1829
The earliest fully narrated passage of freedom seekers through Fort Wayne comes down in a single document: a manuscript written in the biblical cadence of the Society of Friends by Frederick Hoover , a Quaker of the Richmond settlement in Wayne County, Indiana, dated 1829 and preserved, in Griswold's day, by Hoover's…
Fort Wayne
- 1829Allen County: the act, the tavern, the first officers
Under a state act of January 1829 authorizing incorporation on a two-thirds vote of the citizens, Fort Wayne voted on 7 September 1829 to incorporate as a town — the vote certified to the board of county commissioners by William N. Hood, president of the meeting, and John P. Hedges, its clerk.
Fort Wayne
- 1829The federal survey as a map event
The first map of this ground that the record proves is the United States survey itself: the rectangular grid laid over the cession of 1826, which fixed the township lines, the sections, and — in the fall of 1829 — the very quarter-sections on which the town would stand.
New Carlisle
- 1829–1830The Rumpus Over the Name: How South Bend Stayed South Bend
The documented core: the place's first post office, applied for in 1829, went onto the federal books as Southold — addressed, in the postal geography of the day, to Allen County, Indiana.
South Bend
- 1829–1863Colonization: the state's Liberia machinery, and this county's answer
The Indiana Colonization Society, organized at Indianapolis in 1829 as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society, promoted the removal of free Black Hoosiers to Liberia through its newspaper, The Colonizationist , under John D. Defrees.
Mishawaka
- 1829–1863Colonization — the Offer, the Machinery, and the County's Answer
The Indiana Colonization Society was organised at Indianapolis in 1829 as an auxiliary of the American Colonization Society.
Lakeville
- 1829–1906Names that run through the record: the Comptons and the publisher's family
Hugh V. Compton, born 18 September 1829 in Butler County, Ohio, brought to this county at six, kept "a first-class livery stable" in New Carlisle and owned it with a 150-acre farm; in 1880 he rode as a "rider" — a sworn constable for the purpose…
New Carlisle
- 1829–2014The road: Michigan Road, plank road, U.S. 31, SR 931
The Michigan Road was Indiana's first great north–south highway, built with the proceeds of the road-land grant of the 1826 treaty (the land section carries the grant): surveyed 1829, passable by 1834, "completed" in 1837, at a cost of $242,000 (Indiana Historical Bureau marker text), opened a hundred feet wide and…
Lakeville